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AIXpert Blog is about the AIX operating system from IBM running on POWER based machines called Power Systems and software related to it like PowerVM for virtualisation, PowerVC for Deploying VM's and PowerSC for security plus performance monitoring and nmon

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At a recent POWER & AIX Workshop, I was challenged when I stated that you can download IBM Systems Director (ISD) and run it at no costs. Granted: If you want IBM Support for ISD functions then you do need to purchase the license and SWMA for every endpoint (think HMC and every core of any machine that ISD is controlling). Compared to other systems management tools (I have worked with in the past) the ISD prices are very low so its worth asking for the local currency price. I also think most people (including myself) will get stuck on... [More]

It has bee a long few weeks traveling to Dublin, Las Vegas, Slovenia, Germany and Sweden to give lots of presentations. Six Weeks and five countries and the expenses are piling up on my desk. I was presenting a core set of topics like POWER7+ announcement summary, VIOS Shared Storage Pools (SSP3), Workload Partitions (WPAR) and Versioned WPARs to run AIX 5.2 and AIX 5.3, quick introduction to PowerSC (security tools), a Techie "what you need to know about" Systems Director for AIX, and Quick Dips in to Active Memory Deduplication... [More]

I suddenly could not get AIX updates to work via my NIM server. The problem number DNZPAX075E just means the NIM command failed for unknown reasons. Not very helpful when you have a ISD Server, NIM Server and a Target AIX Server and the problem could be anywhere. I looked around and found a few other people were stuck on this one. So now I worked it out - with the help excellent help of systems Director support. 1) Restart the Systems Director Server and the NIM Server - just good house keeping and check you have free disk space in the... [More]

This is part 2 of Systems Director licensing or at least working out what you are doing with System Director that requires a license. In part 1, we looked at listing (via the command line) the POWER machines that Systems Director was connected too. This time we what to find out the machines that Active Energy Manager (AEM) is controlling. Once you have installed AEM it is tempting to start monitoring and controlling all your Power Systems electrical use and temperatures but you should only use AEM if you have a license for AEM for each... [More]

I have long thought it is rather silly that IBM Systems Director can't give you a list the licenses that you should have! It does, after all, know what machines it is controlling and the data is in the database. Perhaps, that will come in the future. What can we do in the short term? Generally, I like to do everything from the graphical user interface (GUI) . I have not got time to learn and use both GUI and CLI. The system configuration data can be extracted using the command line interface (CLI) on the Systems Director server, so I spent... [More]

Stephen Atkins (the Guru behind the nmon Analyser) has released a new version - two days ago. This includes loads of improvements and some new features. Best of all - less problems running on newer Excel releases (it works around inconsistencies with the Microsoft API). I have always said that at least 50% of the popularity of my nmon is down to the excellent Analyser graphs. Very few people regularly see the online screen view. Thanks again Steve, for all your many hours of hard work in your personal time on the behalf of the tens of... [More]

Yes, I admit it I am a "hacker" in the old sense of the word i.e. Definition 4 = A person who is good at programming quickly.See Hackers Dictionary below. I was think that there are certain books every one in the computer industry should have read before they can claim any level of computer expertise. If you have not read them don't tell any one and quickly get yourself a copy and read it quickly. Thumbnails are borrowed from Amazon - thanks guys and good to see all these important books are still available. My five top books all... [More]

I have just updated my article on DeveloperWorks that cover the nweb Webserver. You can find the new link to the new page here: nweb Tiny Safe Static Webserver C code example on the nmon for Linux wiki The previous DeveloperWorks link now mysteriously fails nweb: a tiny, safe Web server (static pages only) The what? I wrote the nweb Webserver as example C code to show the concepts and details of how they work. It was under 100 lines but I thought it actually was a pretty useful... [More]

I have never really understood why I get peaks and troughs in nmon questions and urgent situations but July seems to be a peak and fortunately I was not at work for a large part of it. Performance and nmon Questions trend to come in three flavours: really dumb, genuine and mega-urgent critical lets blame the hardware. Let me give you a flavour of each type of question from the last month. Perhaps, reading these will let you avoid the same problem or at least let you learn "you are not alone". Really dumb "nmon has stopped... [More]

Well, I'm back from a 2.5 week holiday and there is a heap of topics that have built up in that time. My email is very full of things I need to share so expect a blog per day for a while. My friend for the last couple of decades Michael Perzl in Germany has been very busy in the last month or two. Lots of people that are using AIX every day also want to make use of the popular open source packages. Some of these come as part of AIX (or on extension packs for legal reasons) like Perl, ssh and the basic IBM HTTP server (Apache) part of WAS.... [More]

I highly recommend the AIX Virtual User Group run by Joe Armstrong that roughly has a hot topic Webinar session once a month. Typically, there is 300 to 700 online to the session, many include a demo and there are Slides and Replay downloadable if you miss one or look back over the previous 70 or more sessions and want an update. On the larger hot topics there are lots of questions and answers handled during the session. Officially, it is called the USA AIX Virtual User group but they take registrations from around the world but schedule for... [More]

So I got asked, just as an example configuration which forces lots of workload per CPU: Given a 16 CPU POWER machine and a need to run 100 workloads, would I recommend 100 LPARs or 100 WPARs? In case you are not familiar with POWER technology: LPAR = Logical Partition used the PowerVM to split CPU, memory and I/O across multiple virtual machines (also called virtual servers). The I/O is handles by a special purpose LPAR called the Virtual I/O Server, which provides virtual network, virtual disks, virtual optical and virtual tape. Each LPAR has... [More]

Earlier today I received email from a customer reporting their large POWER7 based machines where on firmware 720_64 to 720_90 and their reluctance to take the outage to upgrade it. They were asking for fine details of newer firmware levels and what advantages this would bring to " justify the outage to their user departments ". To be blunt this is a horror story: I lay awake at night in a cold sweat about stories like this. The customer has the whole "running computers plan upside down". The question should be " can... [More]

I got another WPAR question today: From the Global AIX, I can add a filesystem to /wpars/WPARname/directory so the WPAR has access but what if I don't want to have the filesystem mounted there in the Global AIX? For example: I have a Global AIX filesystem called /tools that I want to mount in to one or many WPARs and appear and /temp in the WPAR(s)? My first answer is well you can use NFS because I do that all the time and I am a heavy user of NFS - no jokes please. I use NFS heavily! If the NFS server exports the mount point for every... [More]

This week I spent 4 hours with a customer covering many advanced WPAR topics and took way a bunch of questions that I had to check the answers and ask the WPAR developers themselves to be sure I had the right answers. If the questions were not clear to my customers and I did know initially know the answers then there may be others with similar issues so I thought I would share the answers with everyone. 1) Workload Partitions - What is the road map? Well, I am not going to make announcements on a blog for sure. If you are new to WPAR, I can... [More]

Recently, I delivered a 7.5 hour Systems Director 6.3 Instructor lead demo at IBM Zurich - that gives us 25 more people ready to dive into using it. It is a very polished building and the IBM Forum is amazing and they even have IBM food :-) I had to take a second mortgage out on my house to pay for the taxi to the airport (fortunately they take a credit card) and I thought Norway was expensive until now! Anyway, when I got back to the UK, I decided to perform the Systems Director 6.3 to 6.3.1 update. You get Systems Director to update... [More]

It was my birthday on Saturday and by pure luck my Raspberry Pi was delivered the day before - what a great day "hacking" (in the old sense of the word). I have been waiting for a few months for this delivery - What a treat!! If you have not heard of this credit size computer before here is the back ground. The Problem In the UK, school information technology education has been pitifully reduced to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My own kids came home badly depressed as they started the classes as they knew far more than the... [More]

Systems Director 6.3.1 is available This includes a fix I needed. On a completely fresh install the Update Manager will not work with the NIM server for AIX updates due to a bug that forgets to create /export/um_lpp_source on the NIM server - oops! Fixed with: /usr/sbin/crfs -v jfs2 -g rootvg -m /export/um_lpp_source -a size=1G But make sure it mounts by default on AIX reboot. Find the What's New for 6.3.1 Install the new ISD 6.3.1 update and lots of fixes - you get Systems Director to do upgrade as normal

Warning: touchy feely comment coming up! I have always found it odd that IBM markets the Hardware = POWER7 a lot and very little marketing on the Operating System = AIX7. Personally, I have more good feelings and positive vibes for AIX operating system
because I log in to every day and use it for hours than I do for the
POWER hardware running it. I very rarely go to the machine room and hug the machine! Does anyone else feel this way or am I sadly alone? Put
it another way would you spend two Dollar Euro Pounds (all increasingly
... [More]

I have been touring cities in Europe: Birmingham for the 4 day Technical University, Manchester, central London and Dublin for the Ask the Experts 1 day event and last week Copenhagen for a POWER & AIX User group Technical Event. I have had about 250 to 300 people in my sessions and asked every time - How knows about the AIX Virtual User Group and only had about 30 people put their hands up. I am amazed how few people have found this invaluable resource. The organiser, Joe Armstrong an IBMer, set-ups up roughly monthly world wide... [More]

It has been a busy fortnight and I just realised I have micro-blogged (Twitter) comments and link but neglected this AIXpert Blog - sorry about that. Here is a summary and a lot more thoughts that Twitter allows. I actually like the discipline of the Twitter 140 characters as if forces you to get to the point!
Firefox First, I have upgraded to Firefox 10 Enterprise from 3.6 - I was having multiple problems with the older release that had previously seemed to be the only safe one for using both HMC and IBM Systems Director. In particular,... [More]

I may have written about these in previous blogs but these have been updated and added too them. They are in my regular Systems Director presentation but I thought they should be shared to a wider audience - no sense is sitting on good information. These are very much my thoughts and opinions for POWER and mostly AIX systems. These are not official IBM statements. 1) Quick Introduction . If you want a 12 minute look at how Systems Director can benefit Power and AIX system administrators in eight ways then watch my 12 minute movie. After... [More]

Many countries switch to Daylight Saving Time (DST) next weekend March 25th - unfortunately you may need to apply a fix to AIX 6 and AIX 7 before the change or programs can get inconsistent time from various time function and systems calls. This could have a major impact on many tools, for example, make, logs and databases ... well just about anything that uses a time value. There was an earlier temporary fix available but now there is a fully details final fix. Please got to the bellow website for all the details :... [More]

As part of my moving computer room project, I had to change the IP address of my Systems Director server. I recall a long time ago there were issues in this area for (I think) ISD 6.1, so I was not looking forward to this change. Just for a change, I thought I would check the documentation first :-) Once I found the 6.3 part of the documentation there was a whole page on how to do this IP address change. It turns out to be very simple on ISD 6.3. Stop Systems Director with: smstop Change the IP address and DNS server, of course, to match.... [More]

We have all heard the old story of a computer company that was so successful that is had to move to smaller premises! The point being that they upgraded the computers to much smaller but more powerful ones and did not need the floor space. Well, it is happening to me! My Advanced Technical Support group are moving from IBM Bedfont Lakes (near Heathrow), UK from building 2 to building 3. That might not sound like much and it is only a stones throw away but we are going from 10 racks down to 3 racks. The old POWER5 machines that were not... [More]

Hi, I just release a fifth hands-on movie this month and on this interesting topic. You can find the movie here: Shared Storage Pools 2 - Thin provisioning, monitoring free space + Alerts Shared Storage Pool Thin provisioning is pretty cool and saves a lot of disk space . Effectively the 100's of GBs of unused disks space in 100's of Virtual Machines (LPARs) are bought together in one place in the Shared Storage Pool and then can be used for real. All this without the use of clever disk subsystems. The risk is that you use all the disk... [More]

In case you missed the announcements, I have released four new movies this week: Shared Storage Pools phase 2 - Getting Started - movie 101 Active Memory Deduplication Theory - movie 102 Active System Optimizer - movie 103 System Director 6.3 First Use - movie 104 Catch them all at the home of POWER6, POWER7, PowerVM, Systems Director and AIX Movies - or save this link for 21 hours of intensive techie learning - http://tinyurl.com/AIXmovies ps: The previous movie last month about installing Systems Director 6.3 on AIX is a good movie... [More]

At last I have got round to rebuilding my Shared Storage Pool cluster of machines. We have the four VIOS limit. So I was thinking: For machines with Dual Virtual I/O Servers - the options are limited so I would pair up machines for mutual Live Partition Mobility. For machines with single VIOSs - I would create a cluster of four machines for some extra flexibility and LPM across any of the machines. The "cluster -create" command to make the first node of the cluster too about 3 minutes and the "cluster -addnode" command... [More]

As we all know, the advanced PowerVM virtualisation functions of POWER7 based machines are implemented in the hardware (the POWER7 processor itself and the System Firmware, which includes PowerVM Hypervisor) for increased security, high performance and reliability. After more than a year of POWER7 field experience and fixes to increase RAS, further development of still more virtualisation functions and improved algorithms for higher performance - it is very important for all of us to install the newer levels of System firmware to avoid already... [More]

I have been running the nmon ( n igel's mon itor) for AIX project for 15 years now but I am still learning. I initially wrote it to help me run AIX 3.2 then AIX 4 benchmarks on RS/6000 machines as running the older "down the screen" and "line by line" tools like vmstat and iostat was driving me mad (literally making my eye hurt) and so using screen curses enabled the number to stop moving on the screen. nmon's second most important feature was to make graphing the results simpler as a graph includes the time dimension, it... [More]